Mainframes are primed to churn through and store huge amounts of data every day, and the traditional workflow has long meant that batch processing is a prescheduled, after-hours event. But is that workflow still the right solution at a time when IT is being asked to move faster?

Since the advent of computing machines, one requirement has been the ability to record instructions and present them again to the machine to perform the same process, to either repeat the same output or act on a different set of data.

For the typical mainframer, any system that does not have the letter z at the beginning of its name is not really a system worth considering or working with. Those “other” systems are widely known as “Toy Town” systems. Systems for the little kids to play with.